Sometimes you can know things. Things about yourself. Things from before you can remember.

What better place to kill time than a library?

As for you, you are alive. But it's not the same as living.

Our lives are so important to us that we tend to think the story of them begins with our birth. First there was nothing, then I was born...Yet that is not so. Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Families are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating. Impossible to understand one part without having a sense of the whole. - Vida Winter

A birth is not really a beginning. Our lives at the start are not really our own but only the continuation of someone else's story.

I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Books are for me, it must be said, the most important thing.

I shall start at the beginning. Though of coarse, the beginning is never where you think it is.